Teespring: Custom Shirts Made Easy

Dubbed “a Kickstarter for T-shirts” by VentureBeat, Teespring is a Y Combinator startup that allows amateur merchandisers and marketers to create and sell custom tees. Users create a T-shirt design, upload it to the Teespring website, set a goal for the number of shirts they wish to sell, and promote the tee on their own site using an embedded sales page. If the sales goal is reached, Teespring will print and ship the shirt while the user collects the profit; if not, the campaign simply gets canceled.

Teespring was co-founded by Brown University alums Walker Williams and Evan Stites-Clayton. A few years ago, a local college dive bar was raided by police and shut down, leaving students angry. The enterprising duo realized that a T-shirt would bring the campus together, so they designed a shirt with the bar's name and logo and posted it on Facebook. They sold hundreds of tees within 24 hours and soon received requests from other people who also wanted to sell T-shirts to their communities.

Launched in April of 2012, Teespring has already reached $750,000 in monthly revenue.